KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

Corrective and Preventative Action (CAPA) is an effective improvement technique that helps organizations investigate the root causes of any known problems or potential risks. The corrective action addresses something problematic that has happened, while the preventative action aims to avoid potential future problems. Corrective actions happen in response to things like product defects, identified waste, or customer complaints. Preventative actions may be applied to potential safety risks, competitive threats, or falling performance indicators. CAPA software has been developed to help organizations support this management technique. Here are the key advantages it offers.

As a sales executive for KaiNexus, I speak with Lean leaders and continuous improvement gurus daily. Most of them are excited about continuous improvement, but they are frustrated with the lack of supporting technology. However, once they decide to solve the technology problem, the face a new challenge - getting a new tool or platform approved and purchased. This is called the Buyer’s Journey, and it’s a foreign concept for so many people. Enter KaiNexus. The first three steps in most of my customer engagements are pretty standard and go something like this:

The 5S technique is part of a broader set of management practices known as visual management or visual control. Although these tools are often used by organizations that employ the Lean management or the Toyota Production System, they can be used by any organization seeking to optimize workspaces and processes. 5S can be implemented without technology to support it, but our clients have found that the digital approach can smooth the process and amplify the results.

Visual management, sometimes called visual control, is the technique of communicating information using visual signals rather than text or written instruction. People process visual images much more quickly than text, so the approach is an excellent way to achieve efficiency and clarity of communications. We often think of huddle boards or Kanban cards when we think about visual management, but it can take many forms. For example, some organizations have different colored uniforms for different teams, others use visual cues to mark where tools should be placed when not in use.

According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a rapid improvement cycle is a, "Quality improvement method that identifies, implements and measures changes made to improve a process or a system.” In other words, it is an organized approach to making processes better in short order. You don’t use a rapid improvement cycle to shoot for the moon, but rather to make incremental changes that add up to major success. Each cycle builds on the work done during the last and suddenly that mountain doesn’t seem so hard to climb.

How to Manage Your Improvement Metrics More Efficiently and Effectively In this webinar, you will learn: Some of the common mistakes people make when looking at performance metrics and the resulting problems Simple, but statistically valid and effective methods for creating, maintaining, and reviewing charts over time When to react and ask “what happened?” when reviewing new data points in a chart When to stop overreacting to individual data points and improve the overall system, instead How to integrate this into your use of KaiNexus or for charts you create in Excel

Kaizen events are an effective way to implement significant improvements in short order. They are used to tackle all sorts of issues from workplace organization, to process optimization and everything in between. Because Kaizen events are resource intensive, usually pulling people from their ordinary work for three to five days, it is essential to get the most out of every one. We’ve had lots of in-depth conversations with clients who’ve conducted rapid improvement events of all sorts. Some of them exceeded the goals of the projects, while others didn’t work out very well at all. Here are some of the things our clients have shared that can make all the difference.

Strategy Deployment is a hot topic in continuous improvement circles these days. We’re delighted to see that because effective strategy deployment can make the difference between reaching the goals of the organization in the expected time frame and failing to achieve the breakthrough objectives. Of course, strategy deployment isn’t easy and few companies really excel at the practice. Strategy deployment software has been developed to help provide a structure for the practice and keep organizations on track. We’ve had lots of productive conversations with leaders about how strategy deployment software can help smooth the path to success. Here are the questions that we get asked most often.

A post by Jeff Roussel, read by Mark Graban Every time we walk into a facility and see a Kaizen board, we are reminded about the excitement and sense of anticipation that most teams have when the Kaizen board is first introduced. But very often, when we ask front line employees about them the response is tepid at best. There may still be huddle meetings where the progress of each improvement is discussed, and a card might get moved from one stage to another from time to time, but the initial excitement wanes quickly and the whole thing becomes a chore. In many cases, we look a little closer and see that no new improvement work has been added for months or that work is stalled out with no movement in sight.

When I sat down to write about sustaining innovations, the word that popped into my mind was “entropy.” While entropy is a scientific term related to the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity, it is also used to refer to a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder. Entropy is a very real thing in organizations. Practices are implemented and improvements deployed, yet over time, things seem to revert to the way they were always done.